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Chapter 2
Ross reined in his horse and drew his coat tight against the autumn chill. The waning moon had cast a ghostly light over the valley, turning it into an eldritch landscape of midnight-blue and shadow. To the south, on the edge of the cliffs, lay Wheal Grace. She was lit up by the flickering candles and lamps of the miners who worked on into the night. The rhythmic clunk of the headgear rose up over the noise of the pounding surf and the whole place hummed with purpose.
It had been a busy few days, meeting with Pascoe in Truro and attending to other business there. He was pleased to be back on his own land at last. Shifting in the saddle, he looked over towards Nampara. The house was in darkness. A small sting in his chest took him by surprise. It was unreasonable to feel disappointed, he told himself; it was late, after all. He could hardly expect Demelza to wait up for him as she used to. With a press of his knees, he urged his horse forward and as he rode down the valley, his words of a fortnight ago rattled around in his head.
My feeling about Elizabeth's marriage need not be gone into now…
Empty words. Weasel words. The pretentious words of a fool. Inexplicable in one who could make a pretty enough speech to save his own life but not, it seemed, his marriage. He owed her so much more but every time he went to say something, guilt tied his tongue even as his conscience conjured up excuse after facile excuse for what he had done. And in the end it all sounded wrong, even to his own mind, and was better left unsaid.
So why on earth had he uttered those words then? Some maggot in his brain, no doubt. He had hoped the promising news about Wheal Grace would be the thing to push past these months of estrangement, but then he'd gone and spiked his own guns. She had tried to smile when he told her but those other words hung over them like a storm about to break. He knew she wanted more - deserved more - but how to explain it all without doing further damage? And the hurt in her eyes… By God, but he wanted to run from that. A coward by any measure, and beyond belief in a man who had never held back from the fray. He hardly knew himself.
What had followed then were all the easy, expected words about their good fortune and nothing touching on what really mattered, nothing to set things right between them. And then the retreat: each to their own empty bed. Did she miss him as much as he missed her, he wondered. Reaching out in the night for the warm, slender weight of her and finding nothing. Waking up alone, hard and aching, needing the comfort of her in his arms and left wanting.
But it went deeper than that. He missed her vitality, the spark that animated her. Since that night in May, after the first rush of anger and pain, she had been but a polite, distant shadow of herself. His fault, he knew. He no longer had any idea what she was thinking and they no longer laughed together. He felt that loss more keenly than all the rest. She kept her sharp wit well-hidden and shared none of her amusing insights with him. He had no one to blame but himself.
The screech of an owl rang out in the Long Field and Ross looked up from his thoughts. He was at the bottom of the garden. Demelza's flowerbeds lay neglected in the moonlight. Another injury to his credit. She had lost all heart to tend to them, and freed from her watchful eye the weeds had run wild over summer. But the days were shorter now and the sandy soil was finally putting paid to all; the die-off had started.
He thought of the other small pleasures she had abandoned. Though the mundane chores of house and field were still attended to with the same capable efficiency, she no longer went about her work with a song on her lips, and the spinet in the parlour sat untouched. He had heard her husky contralto tones once or twice with Jeremy but not the spontaneous upwelling of joy that came from a glad heart and high spirits.
Of course, her heart had been troubled long before May; he saw that now. How could he not? Self-knowledge had been bought dear. In the strife-torn years following Julia's death, he had slipped away from her, bit-by-bit, slowly gravitating back to Elizabeth. And then, after Francis's death and all those disasters, it had become a headlong rush. Blinkered by the past, he had lost all sight of what really mattered, who really mattered… Judas God! He had become more of a husband to his cousin's widow than to his own wife, putting her interests before those of Demelza and Jeremy, using more weasel words to justify himself. He had not needed to give Elizabeth the whole six hundred pounds he felt he owed her. Common sense should have told him as much. With careful management and economy, half that amount would have seen her and Geoffrey Charles right for a good long while. Demelza could have managed on half as much again - less, even. God knows she had managed on little enough these past few years.
And as for spending so many hours with Elizabeth, helping her with her business, taking pleasure in her company, in the renewed attraction between them… He had indulged in a deluded fantasy with a woman who could never be the one he needed - the one who filled his heart - and through all those deceitful months, Demelza had paid the lonely price of his generosity, his honour… his faithless stupidity. He was no longer able to fool himself on that score.
A sigh of wind whispered through the night and some small creature rustled in the weeds. Ross dismounted and led his horse the rest of the way to the stables. Insight had come only by degrees. Over the summer, he had worked the longest hours of any of the miners, losing himself in the daily rhythm of hard slog and the ebb and flow of easy talk. But each day, when the other men had gone home and he'd toiled on long into the evening, there had been no escaping his tangled thoughts, no escaping the confusion that swirled around in his mind: Elizabeth, Demelza, himself. And nor had there been any escape from the knowledge of his perfidy towards the one woman who had every claim on his love and his loyalty.
True, he had wronged Elizabeth in some measure too, but she had played her part in what had happened and her actions were for her own conscience to answer to, just as his were for him. He didn't hate her - could never hate her - but he saw her more clearly now: as a person in her own right, with her own share of human frailty, and not the perfect, faultless woman he had so blindly built her up to be. That he had made no effort to seek her out afterwards, had no desire to, told him a great deal in the end, and all through the long summer months he had chipped away at his thoughts until, finally, he had broken through to the lodestone: the unshakable certainty of who he wanted and what he wanted his life to be.
After he had finished seeing to the mare, Ross walked out into the yard and stopped. As he looked up at the gibbous moon and winking stars, his thoughts returned to Demelza. She was his real love, his true love, and he was drawn to her every time: to her warmth and her laughter; to her earthy passion and wit, her dear face and form. To her fierce love and loyalty…
They were fighters both, and in their six years together as husband and wife, they had shared the highs and lows of life, and everything in between. She had backed him - stood with him - in everything that mattered. Knew him better than anyone and accepted him - loved him - with all his flaws. She had opened his eyes to other perspectives, shown him new ways of looking at the world, and was so vital a part of his happiness that it was impossible to imagine anything other than a dull, flat life without her. He lifted his foot and brushed a speck of dirt off his boots then silently entered the house and bolted the door behind him.
Love and loyalty, and fierce with it. That was the core of her. Fighting for those she loved and loving them with warmth and passion. And worthy of the same in return. In elevating Elizabeth above all, in acting as he had, he had shown Demelza the most appalling lack of respect and had given her every reason to doubt his own love for her. He would not wonder if she no longer considered him worth fighting for.
But she had stayed, and that had to mean something. Surely he still had some small claim on that fierce loyalty of hers even though his own had been so sorely lacking. He couldn't believe - didn't want to believe - that she wouldn't, in time, forgive him.
Pausing at the foot of the stairs, he looked up past the landing. She was up there, asleep in their old room, and he ached to go to her as he used to… To slip under the covers beside her, take her in his arms and kiss her awake. Show her all the ways in which he loved her. It was impossible, of course; he hadn't yet found the words to heal the breach and he was under no illusion that she would welcome him under such circumstances.
Going against every desire, against every wish of his heart, he turned away from the stairs and continued on to Joshua's old room off the library. He had made his bed there for the last four months and what an empty, loveless bed it had been. But no more. Tomorrow he would make a start on repairing all the damage he had done and weasel words be damned. He would reclaim the woman he loved above all others and share life fully with her once more. His last thought before he went to sleep was that he would fight for her.
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References:
"My feeling about Elizabeth's marriage need not be gone into now." Winston Graham, 'Warleggan', Book 4, Chapter 1.
